🚀 go-pugleaf

I have a question for any of you BC++ users out there: 

I was writing a class that descends directly from the borland Object class. In
order to be able to instantiate from the new class, I have to provide all of the
pure virtual functions that the Object class defines.

The Object class contains member functions which look like this:

virtual int isSortable( const _FAR & Object ) const;
                                              ^^^^^

My questions are: 

1) What meaning does the use of the const modifier have for the
definition of the member function? I have found no references to this either in
the Borland manuals, or other C++ books.

2) Is this notation a Borland extension to the language? Has it gone before the
committee that is building the C++ standard?


I also toyed with this construct:


virtual const char *getPointer .....

to attempt to return a "safe" pointer to character strings. Although C++ accepted
this syntax, it did not complain when the code later modified the pointer value.


Any responses?